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If you missed Part 1, click here.
Plato ostensibly devoted an entire book, the Lysis, to defining philia, which, unlike Aristotle, he was reluctant to distinguish from erotic love, or erôs.
In the Lysis, Socrates is in conversation with two youths, Lysis and Menexenus. Socrates tells the youths, who are friends to each other, that, whereas some people desire horses, or dogs, or gold, or honour, he would ‘rather have a good friend than the best cock or quail in the world’: ‘Yea, by the dog of Egypt, I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius [the emperor of Persia at its peak], or even to Darius himself: I am such a lover of friends as that.’
Since Lysis and Menexenus appear to possess the treasure of friendship in each other, perhaps Menexenus can tell him: when one person loves another, which of the two becomes the friend of the other, the lover or the beloved? Menexenus replies that either may be the friend of the other, that is, they both are friends. Socrates says that this cannot be, since one person may love another who does not love him back, or even hates him.
Menexenus proposes that, unless both love each other, neither is a friend. But Socrates once again disagrees: if something that does not love in return is not beloved by a lover, then there could be no lovers of such things as horses, wine, or wisdom. Thus, that which is beloved, whether or not it loves in return, may be dear to the lover of it. This is the case, for example, with children who are too young to love, or who despise their parents for punishing them. So much suggests that the beloved is the friend of the lover, and the hated the enemy of the hater, but the implication is then that some people are loved by their enemies and hated by their friends, which seems absurd. Thus, neither the lover nor the beloved can be said necessarily to be a friend to the other.
Socrates is uneasy about this conclusion, and the reasoning that led to it, and turns for guidance to the poets, who say that ‘like loves like’. This aphorism, he surmises (and this is very Socratic), must only apply to good people, since bad people are in some way unlike themselves and just as likely as anyone else to hate other bad people. Thus, good people are friends with other good people, while bad people have no friends.
But Socrates remains unconvinced: like cannot be of any use to like, and if people cannot be of any use to one another, they cannot love each other. It remains possible that they love each other because they are good, but the good is by definition self-sufficient and so without need or want of friendship…
The debate in the Lysis goes on and on. In seeking to define philia, Socrates ties himself up into ever more complicated knots—almost as if he were trying to demonstrate the limits of logic and reason, or demonstrate how they may be abused.
At the end of the Lysis, Socrates throws up his arms in despair and exclaims:
So what is to be done? Or rather is there anything to be done? I can only, like the wisemen who argue in courts, sum up the arguments: if neither the beloved, nor the lover, nor the like, nor the unlike, nor the good, nor the congenial, nor any other of whom we spoke—for there were such a number of them that I cannot remember them all—if none of these are friends, I know not what remains to be said... O Menexenus and Lysis, how ridiculous that you two boys, and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends—this is what the bystanders will go away and say—and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend!
The Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but there is much more to it than a few misguided notions. By engaging Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is showing them that, even though they count each other as friends, they do not really understand what friendship is, and that, whatever it is, it is far more significant than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they presume to share.
Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to enlighten the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with them as he does, he is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with the barren banalities with which most people befriend one another, but with the pregnant philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the most perfect and fertile of friendships. In the course of the debate, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, implying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship which he has in mind is so rare and refined that even he does not possess it.
If friendship ultimately escapes definition, this is because, like philosophy itself, it is not so much a thing as a process of becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion: they are, in effect, each other’s therapist—and in that much it helps to find a friend with some degree of openness, articulacy, and insight, both to change and to be changed.
For Socrates as for Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.
